Selecting the Same Sex

There is one place where the definition of
gender remains binary – in the womb. When it comes to sonograms,
amniocentesis and standard pre-natal testing, there are no nuances.
Here, the pronouncement, “It’s a girl,” can translate into fierce and
instant parental rejection. The fact is that when the issue is “sex
selection abortion,” the same sex is always being selected — female.

Abortion has been regularly used as a method of sex selection in certain regions of the world, particularly China and India, where sons are more highly prized than daughters. But it was something of a surprise to doctors in Sweden.
When the mother of two daughters arrived at Mälaren Hospital, seeking
tests to determine the sex of her fetus. If female, she declared, she
intended to abort.

Here in the U.S. a recent New York Times article
reported slight statistical variations among Americans of Chinese,
Korean or Indian descent, suggesting that the cultural preference for
boys in these societies is continuing in this country.

The story reported on research conducted by Douglas Almond and Lena Edlund
and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers’ say their analysis of the 2000 Census shows that the
odds increase beyond what is standard for a third child to be a boy in
Asian-American families from China, Korea and India if the family did
not already have a son. The data "suggest that in a sub-population with
a traditional son preference, the technologies are being used to
generate male births when preceding births are female," they wrote in
the paper.

In an op-ed in The Washington Times, Trent wrote,"Regardless
of one’s position on abortion, this form of discrimination should
horrify every American. The idea of killing a baby simply because she
is a girl is reprehensible."

Posing the Right Question

While
sex selection abortion allows women to make what is, in a sense, the
ultimate in supposedly informed consumerism, it also can work to create
a world where being female is viewed as the primary and most terminal
of birth defects.

News reports describe a new test
being marketed that can determine the sex of a fetus after only 10
weeks, rather than the 20 weeks of the traditional sonogram. In light
of these developments, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby
asked, "What kind of feminist would it be who could contemplate the use
of abortion to eliminate ever-greater numbers of girls, and not cry out
in horror?"

This is the place where my feminism and pro-choice
philosophies collided violently. I sat across from her and thought of
her fetus and the “primal birth defect” it carried and felt rage and
despair, as if it were me she would be negating.

I so much
wanted to say: ”No. STOP! You should not.” Not “You cannot,” but “You
should not.” Yes, this feminist makes judgments — value judgments —
and, sometimes, I disagree profoundly with some women’s choices.

I would not personally make a decision to abort on that basis — or for
some of the other reasons that women present themselves for abortions.

But I have spent the better part of my life defending the principle of
reproductive freedom and have provided the service to thousands of
women for over 38 years because, ultimately, women do and should have
the right to make what may be to others the wrong choice.

It’s about separating the chooser from the choice.

The Random House Webster College Dictionary defines choice as the right, power or opportunity to choose.

When an individual makes a choice, it is the act of “the making,” the
active will and power of choosing itself that has unconditional value,
not the result of the choosing. The only absolute in this equation is
the one who chooses, that is, it is the individual woman who is the
active moral agent in the decision-making process and not the state,
the court or any political body.

The choice can be morally
good, or not. This, of course, brings into view the nature of morality.
If an individual has an absolutist value that all abortions, for
whatever reason, are evil, then there is no further discussion. The
raped nine-year-old, the incested 10-year-old, whomever-under-whatever
circumstances: all are committing an evil act. There can be no
possibility of choice because a woman choosing an abortion is a generic
evil which should preclude the choice itself.

Interestingly enough, with Roe v. Wade in the background giving women the opportunity not
to be pregnant, the act of continuing a pregnancy is more of a “choice”
than it ever was historically. Each time a woman actively continues
with her pregnancy, the ”wantedness” of every child increases.

Some believe that the choice of abortion is wrong in all places for all
time. But attitudes about abortion are situational, historic and
geographic.

My work to open Choices East, a satellite of Choices Women’s Medical Center in New York,
in the former Soviet Union was inspired by a 35-year-old woman who came
to our medical center for her 36th abortion. Like so many other Russian
émigré women living in New York, she was violently opposed to using
birth control because her Russian doctor taught her that "the Pill" was
far more dangerous than repeat abortions. This misinformation benefited
Russian physicians because they could earn extra money doing abortions
on women in their homes to supplement their three dollars a month
salary. Other forms of contraception were unavailable for all practical
purposes. For these women, the "issue" of abortion posed no questions
of morality, ethics, or women’s rights versus fetal life. There was
only the harsh reality that sex rarely came without anxiety and that the price one often paid for it was high and dangerous.

Are these women who have no other choice continually making the wrong one?

Are the women of China and India who are so much a product of their
paternalistic and misogynistic cultures making the wrong choice when
they want a child who will not join their husband’s families after
marriage or when they want sons to take care of parents as they age, as
are the practices in their societies?

Are they making a wrong choice if the results of their choice
determine their ability and their family’s ability to survive? When and
where is a choice right or wrong? And, according to whose dictates?

If we, in fact, say “trust women,” then we are assuming that we should
also trust them when we feel that the choice they are making is wrong
for us personally, or wrong in our view of general ethical principles.

The issue of sex selection abortion is difficult because it is a place
where the rights and values of the chooser clash violently with the
nature of the choice.

Morality and Human Rights

Long time colleague Frances Kissling, writing in Salon
describes a hypothetical scenario that she was presented with at a
Planned Parenthood conference 15 years ago. Asked whether or not, if
she were a doctor, she would provide a sex selection abortion, she
said. "I wouldn’t do it," but thought a policy should be implemented
that was "open to referring women to providers who do."

She
goes on to say, “Just because something is legal — and should be legal
— does not mean it is always ethical….If pro-choice advocates follow
the example of those opposed to abortion and present only one value —
a women’s right to make this decision — as the only ethical
consideration worth discussing in difficult cases, do we not become as
extremist as we say they are?”

Kissling compresses all the myriad pro-choice thinking into one
collective body with the same interests that arbitrate morality. By
implying that defending a woman’s fundamental right to choose is a
potentially extremist position, and calling choice "single value
ethics," as she does in the article, Kissling both diminishes and
disregards individual women’s ethical decisions and presents values in
the collective absolute. There is no conceptual or philosophical
equality here To accept the language of the opposition is to cede our moral compass.

Unlike Kissling who believes that "there is a point where our
respect for potential life, for that individual fetus, should outweigh
a woman’s desire, even need, not to be pregnant," Marianne Mollmann of Human Rights Watch
offers a different perspective: "The solution to the prevalence of
sex-selective abortion is to remove the motivation (emotional or real)
behind the procedure by advancing women’s human rights and their
economic and social equality," she wrote in a June commentary.

Yes, the solution to the dilemma of the chooser and the choice is to
create a world where women truly have both equal and human rights. The
solution is to focus on changing the need for the choice of abortion,
not to criminalize the chooser.

Every day at Choices, women
go into the counseling sessions and answer the question, “Why are you
having this abortion?” Not infrequently, they answer with a statement
like “Oh I’m not at all like all the others in the waiting room, I
really wanted to keep this pregnancy, but…”

It’s in the but that the reality of abortion lies.

Practitioners who counsel women seeking abortions do an exercise called
"the last abortion." The participants choose one woman among six who
will be allowed to receive the last abortion on earth. It is an
exercise in individual ethics and forces one to confront her own
prejudices. There is an orphaned teenager, a victim of rape, a woman
carrying a medically deformed fetus, a 46-year-old woman with HIV, a
12-year-old, and a graduate student who wants to finish her Ph.D. They
all have good reasons, because all the reasons are theirs. And in the
end, that is the answer: All the reasons are theirs.

So eloquently said, Merle and how true. Your piece will undoubtedly discomfit many and hopefully shake people’s minds enough to be willing to see the nuances in reproductive freedom. It’s all about when does an abortion provider feel it’s OK to force a woman to continue an unwanted pregnancy. I would argue that women shouldn’t ever have to give us “reasons”, it’s good enough for me that the woman does not want to carry this particular pregnancy to term.

crowepps

it also can work to create a world where being female is viewed as the primary and most terminal of birth defects.

Create? Sorry, we’re already THERE or demand for sex selection abortions would be nonexistent. Certainly the insistence in some circles that the purpose of being female is pregnancy and that women who cannot or choose to not be pregnant are defective and a burden on society demonstrates that ‘normal’ is either male or useful in producing males.

The solution is to focus on changing the need for the choice of abortion, not to criminalize the chooser. Every day at Choices, women go into the counseling sessions and answer the question, “Why are you having this abortion?”

And yet the concept of the "counseling session" itself is based on the underlying assumption that abortion is abnormal and that the woman must produce an acceptable ‘excuse’ for the counselor.

invalid-0

While it is true that aborting females is a tragically common practice in Asian countries, there is no evidence that females are aborted more often in the U.S. (except among Asian immigrants, as noted).

Since abortion has been legalized in the U.S., the ratio of females born in this country vs. males has actually *increased*, not declined. (The previous 51/49 male/female ratio is edging closer to 50/50.) If Americans were routinely using sex-selective abortion against females, why are just as many girls as boys still being born? In fact, the vast majority of abortions occur before it is even possible to know the baby’s sex, so sex is very rarely the reason for any abortion.

It is a gross mischaracterization to assume that U.S. parents have the same son preference that is present in Chinese and Indian culture; in the U.S., *more* parents seeking to adopt, and seeking to use preconception sex selection, desire girls than boys.

While the notion of sex selective abortion is tragic, it is not a feminist issue in this country, because there is no evidence that girls are targeted more often than boys.

invalid-0

If women in China and India are undervalued, (and clearly they are) then why do you assume that they are the ones making the decision to terminate female pregnancies? What about the husband or in laws who don’t want a female child? A woman I know from Poland told me once that when she went to have her second baby her mother in law told her “If you have another girl go back to your mother’s. My son needs a son.” I would argue that in many cases it is the exploiters themselves who want to terminate female pregnancies. Just because a woman ultimately has an abortion doesn’t necessarily mean that all is well in the world she lives in.

invalid-0

If women in China and India are undervalued, (and clearly they are) then why do you assume that they are the ones making the decision to terminate female pregnancies?

Because when you’ve lived in a culture all your life, its values become a part of you. Why would (most) women even get to the point where they need to be pressured to abort? They themselves can figure out the calculus (girl = leaves to live with husband’s family, boy = stays with us and takes care of us in our old age) and come to a decision based on that on their own.